Most writers, going to the well of inspiration and coming up empty, find themselves staring for hours at a blank computer screen. Not Jane Kramer. She heads for the kitchen: “My stove is where my head clears, my impressions settle, my reporter’s life gets folded into my life, and whatever I’ve just learned, or think I’ve learned — whatever it was, out there in the world, that had seemed so different and surprising — bubbles away in the very small pot of what I think I know and, if I’m lucky, produces something like perspective.” And if she’s not lucky, at least dinner is taken care of.

A longtime correspondent for The New Yorker, Kramer has pursued stories from Sweden to Morocco to the Kalahari Desert of Botswana, and while food doesn’t necessarily find its way onto her pages it’s usually lurking somewhere in the margins. Because — as this delectable collection of culinary profiles, book reviews and reminiscences makes clear — the tastes and smells and rituals of the table can often tell us a great deal about people and their priorities. It can even, in the case of a writer like Claudia Roden, the cookbook doyenne of the Middle Eastern diaspora, “reconstruct a world.”

Kramer’s portraits of influential figures like Roden and the “culinary anthropologist” Naomi Duguid are filled with lively tales of their travels, following Roden from her home in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of London to a Spanish farmhouse in Asturias or sitting in Duguid’s bustling Toronto kitchen and sampling dishes inspired by conversations with Kazakh noodle makers. But it’s the offhand remarks about cult figures like Yotam Ottolenghi (who admits to a weakness for drugstore candy and claims to have had more trouble mastering pastry than he did, as a philosophy grad student, tussling with Hegel) that move Kramer’s writing from informative to irresistible. The detail that stuck with me from her essay about the inventive Italian chef Massimo Bottura wasn’t a dissection of one of his “dishes as metaphors.” (I’ll take a pass on “Black on Black, his tribute, by way of squid ink, katsuobushi and a black cod, to Thelonious Monk.”) It was her description of Italy as “a country so resistant to culinary experiment that grown men will refuse to eat their wives’ cooking and go ‘home’ for lunch instead.”

Kramer claims, early on, not to be “as tasty or exotic as the characters I usually choose.” Most readers will disagree. Whether she’s recalling her first experience cooking rabbit (“also, unhappily, my daughter’s pet rabbit”) or confiding that making a Bolognese sauce is her way of easing into writing about a tricky personality (a tactic used “since I first tackled the subject of François Mitterrand”), she’s a writer whose voice is so appealing that you forgive her for being a cook with not one but two well-equipped kitchens — even if the second is in an envy-inducing farmhouse in Umbria, where she spends every summer after decamping from the not exactly resourceless precincts of the Upper West Side of New York.

Despite the occasional paean to a culinary authority like Bee Wilson, the second half of “The Reporter’s Kitchen” is decidedly Kramer-centric. Her essay on cookbooks (“I am addicted to them. I keep a pile on the floor of my study in New York.... I keep another pile on my bedside table, knowing that if I wake in the middle of the night I can pick one up and drift off into a soothing dream of Joël Robuchon’s mashed potatoes”) will appeal to those of us who have succumbed to the same affliction. Kramer even manages to make it sound if not entirely rational, then at least understandable: “In my kitchen dreams, there are no crises. My books preclude them.... And I have sous-chefs — I think of them as husbands — standing quietly behind me, ready to shuck the oysters, stir the cornmeal, pit the olives.”

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Kramer’s essay on foraging, “The Food at Our Feet,” is both hilarious and humbling, a reminder that “only a small fraction of the planet’s bounty gets to anyone’s dinner table.” Over the course of several months, she joins diligent scavengers at the fringes of supermarket parking lots and on thistle-infested beaches, absorbing advice along the way: “Don’t overdo the elderberry unless you need a laxative. Beware of plants with pretty berries or pretty names, and especially of plants with both,” which means to remember, for example, that “the flowering plant called lords-and-ladies, with its juicy scarlet berries and sultry folded hood, was more accurately known to generations of poisoners as the deadly Arum ‘kill your neighbor.’”

Luckily, Kramer also harvests some of nature’s delicacies: wild mint, fennel and asparagus in Italy, borage flowers and yarrow leaves in England. But when she returns to New York from a high-intensity outing with the Danish chef René Redzepi, the iconic master of Nordic cuisine (who insists that everyone he employs join him on at least one food-gathering excursion to the woods or the sea, or both), she’s relieved to discover that she has missed the Vassar Club’s foraging tour of Central Park. Briefly falling off the eco-enlightened wagon, she orders a steak from Citarella. To be delivered.

Despite identifying herself as “a cautious carnivore,” Kramer writes engagingly about the “highly idiosyncratic spectrum” of vegetarianism and her own forays into its intricacies. Although initially daunted by some of its sacred texts — “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” is found to weigh “more than ‘The Raj Quartet’ (a better read, but still bone-bruising if you happened to be reading in bed)” — she’s pleased to realize that a new generation of chefs and writers like Deborah Madison (the author of many cookbooks, including the just-mentioned tome) have moved beyond the dreary preachiness and “defiantly artisanal” menus of earlier times and “started making vegetables delicious by approaching, say, a cauliflower with the same culinary imagination that they would otherwise apply to a Mexican short-ribs braise or an inside-out porchetta.”

Vegetable soups and dinner salads may be turning up more frequently on Kramer’s table, but certain of her culinary priorities remain unchanged. Prime evidence is offered in “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a chapter devoted to her attempts to cook Thanksgiving dinner in venues as diverse as an eggplant-rich, turkey-deprived Moroccan city and a medieval village in the Apennine foothills. Kramer’s accounts of these festivities are so entertaining they make you want to turn up at her front door on the morning of the holiday, as two Italian Communist dairy farmers once did, having sold out to a rich German and decided to cross the Atlantic and take her up on the invitation she’d casually issued years earlier while interviewing them for a story.

Kramer calls herself an “amateur of Thanksgiving,” adding that her family prefers to append the phrase “regrettably hospitable,” which she amends to “strategically hospitable” because talking about this quintessentially American meal “has turned out to be the stealth weapon of my reporting life,” a way of getting even the most recalcitrant individuals to open up and share their own reminiscences.

Fittingly enough, Kramer’s best Thanksgiving took place out of season and out of place: in Italy in the heat of August. Her exuberant description of that dinner proves her contention that it’s the celebration, not the calendar, that matters. And, of course, the food.